Situation
As a consultant and trainer for TLG Learning, I worked regularly with some of the Puget Sound’s biggest companies, nonprofits, civic and federal government organizations to train thousands of employees on using Microsoft and Adobe software.
The City of Bellingham had found the transition to a new software suite particularly frustrating for its hundreds of employees and dozens of departments. The city decided to bring me in to give a single 8 hour training in the hope of getting a few employees prepared to train the rest of the city.
Task
I worked with the city’s training organizer to uncover the use scenarios of employees, as well as some of the frustrations users had shared. Using these interviews and data, I customized a transition course between the old and new software versions.
During the training day, I focused primarily on two major frustrations I’d uncovered in my research: locating features that had been relocated in the new software, and guiding employees through new, improved options that would make their specific jobs easier. I designed this training to be a hands-on lab, where students could try the software in real time as we learned.
Results
The feedback from my train-the-trainers session was so positive that the city changed course. Rather than use its own employees as trainers, the city hired me to design and deliver a series of courses and meetings for its entire workforce, across all city departments over several months. City employees left these training sessions with much higher satisfaction ratings for the new software than when they entered, and the additional contracts resulted in an estimated $75,000 in revenue for my employer.